Re: Female Leaders

[Tom Stermitz <Stermitz @RAGTIME.ORG>]

Marisa Homes wrote:
>
>As an additional point, I actually feel I'm getting my
>money's worth from lessons when I pay to study the
>lead.  I am getting pretty tired of going to a class
>as a follower, paying the same as the leaders, and not
>getting one single word of personal advice from the
>instructor in a lesson that runs an hour and a half.
>Can she not so much as tell me (*again*) to reach back
>from my hip?  Can she not give me some piece of advice
>about how to correct the balance problem she
>identified three weeks ago when she used me as a demo
>dummy?
>
>For goodness sakes!  When I study the lead, the
>instructor is all over my posture, my timing, my
>balance, my breathing.  When I study the follow, I may
>as well not be present.  And I am talking about three
>separate regular instructors and a number of visiting
>teachers, so the immediate answer is not to change
>teachers.  I am currently convinced that the problem
>exists throughout the American tango scene (at least).
>  There is no question in my mind why women study the
>lead.  I only wonder why any of them persist in
>following long enough to learn to get any pleasure out
>of it.

I would encourage you to continue with the lead. It helps you
understand the dance better, and makes you less dependent on the
leaders, especially when you get someone inexperienced who does
something wrong. You can at least turn him around and show him what
it should be.

The issue of instruction directed at leaders is definitely real, but
beware, because it is also a little misleading. There are several
angles to this.

(1) We always need more leaders and it is a longer road, so perhaps
instruction IS better directed at creating more leaders...

(2) The initiating or directing aspect of tango comes from the
leader. It is structural; without the leader initiating something,
nothing happens. A teacher is somewhat dependent on imposing some
kind of structure or style on the leaders, even if they hope it goes
further than that.

(3) What the leader does is EXTERNAL. It is easy for an
un-imaginative teacher to teach "things"...steps, figures, patterns,
etc. This is especially true for those who learned with the dreaded 8
Count Basic. Their leads to a structural vision of tango; they can't
imagine it being done otherwise. Look at the high percentage of
traveling teachers who come from a stage background. They learn
choreography very easily, so they teach to their strengths...perhaps
not what the students need.

(4)Teaching to followers is completely different from teaching to
leaders. If we lived in mature tango communities with lots of good
male dancers, the women could just get passed from one great leader
to the next, and take a few privates with good teachers.

(5) The follower's role is more intuitive, more internal by nature.
It is very possible to learn a ton of stuff visually and
kinesthetically without ever having explicit words of correction. I
have heard precisely your complaint from a "relatively experienced"
woman who had just sat through a weekend workshop where she had 6
hours in which to watch a truly beautiful argentine dancer show just
how exquisite the dance can be. I wondered to myself why she hadn't
been using those six hours to extract every nuance of style from the
visitor.


All the above things are sort of an apologia or justification of
teaching toward the leaders, but it needn't be that way. In the end,
your criticism is correct, but perhaps not for the reasons you were
compelled to write.


Tango is an intuitive, lead-follow dance for both men and women. If
the teachers focus on steps for the guys, or just "technique", they
are failing both the men and the women.

Watch truly gifted teachers. What they offer is how to DANCE, not how
to execute steps. The deep learning is about connection, lead-follow,
getting into your body, finding the music.

Tango in this sense is NOT about teaching the guys how to "do" stuff.